basement renovation timeline

A sweet reader, Monica, dropped in and left a comment the other day that read:

This is fantastic! We have a similar basement that we’d like to transform. Can you provide some clarity on how you actually renovated it? For example, did you tile right over the concrete floor? Is your ceiling pinned right to the old ceiling? What about wires or pipes? And you just drywalled the walls I assume?

It made us realize that while we touched on it here and there, and while you can find everything from our entire 1976 house renovation under our Money Pit series, it was such a process, the steps became garbled over time. So we thought it was probably good to touch on it again, in one succinct place. For what it’s worth, at the time of writing this I’m still waiting on a few key pieces that were on backorder, so we’ll also be adding to this post to share our final reveals, as well. Our basement is something we’ve received the most questions on so far, so let us know if you’re dropping in today to make sense of our posts with the timeline of our basement, if we can point you in the right direction for anything!

So let’s start at the very beginning, shall we? The story of how we took it from giant spiders and clowns-in-a-crawlspace creepy psychopath basement, to our family’s favorite hang out spot. {Without all that boring 1.5-year waiting period permit stuff, (wheeee Franklin!) anyway.}

In retrospect, we’re glad we waited to begin this basement, because septic and all things permissions. It gave us a year after finishing the upstairs part, to think about what we wanted with the space, along with letting our funds recover a bit. To be honest, at the beginning, we weren’t sure what to do with those giant garage doors, and knew we didn’t want two large and in charge windows in their space. This amongst a few other obstacles like the crawlspace door and giant looming HVAC coming from the ceiling took some thoughtful solutions.

We finally began to make progress here this past fall, when we were granted a permit. We cleaned everything out, and started the drywalling process, right over all those unsightly cinder blocks and intrusive hvac – even though that part was new.

We took a slight detour and were quite derailed when a few more funds were given to our crawlspace due to moisture issues. It was promptly taken care of, and we’re so glad we were made aware of said issues before the rest began. It’s here that we share more plans and how they’ve progressed, along with the outside and how it will meld with the inside.